Rewatching The Book of Boba Fett Four Years Later Exposes Just How Badly Its Writing Failed

The Book of Boba Fett premiered in December 2021 right after The Mandalorian season 2, and expectations were high and fans were excited. By the time the seventh and final episode aired, fans were not just disappointed but angry, and going back through the season four years later shows the problems ran far deeper than the ending that reunited Mando and Grogu so soon after their emotional goodbye.

That ending is the thing this show is best known for ruining, but I wanted to look past that and ask how the rest of the season actually holds up: the writing, the character development, the plot progression. I doubt many people remember the rest of the show because rewatching it is such a pain, so I split it into three parts: the first four Boba Fett focused episodes, the two Mando episodes, and the finale where it is all supposed to come together.

The First Four Episodes Never Explain Why Boba Fett Wants to Rule Tatooine

Those four episodes have one job, and that is getting me to buy that Boba Fett would want to rule and protect Tatooine from the Pykes and their spice trade. That was never part of his character before The Mandalorian, and he is not a Tatooine native the way Anakin was, so the show needs to do real legwork to earn that motivation. Split between present day scenes and flashbacks of Boba with the Tusken Raiders, the season largely fails at that job, though the Tusken material is close to the only nice thing I have to say about this show.

The second episode is genuinely decent because the writers take the time to establish Tusken culture, their relationship to Boba, and why he ends up caring about them. Boba wakes from the Sarlacc, gets captured and enslaved by the Tuskens, then protects a youngling from a monster and is accepted into the clan. In the movies the Tuskens were basically savages who killed Anakin's mother, and even in The Mandalorian season 2 they all looked and acted the same as cannon fodder against the Krayt Dragon. Here they feel like a real tribe with customs, rituals, multiple leaders and younglings, right down to the ritual of building your own gaffi stick.

The chronological jumping between past and present adds nothing and actually halts the pacing, since answers about Boba's past are not that interesting to begin with. The first episode climaxes with Boba killing the monster, which is not a hard enough obstacle to be an effective ending. After Boba and the Tuskens stop the Pyke spice train and warn them off, Boba goes to talk to the Pykes and comes back to find the whole clan slaughtered, which does land. The fourth episode gives us the rest of Boba's flashbacks, and those scenes are confusing. Boba finds Fennec Shand and takes her to a doctor, and when she wakes the two agree to work together. Boba revived Fennec because he knows she is a master assassin who would be very useful in his quest to rule Tatooine, and that part actually makes sense.

Four Possible Reasons Boba Fett Wants to Rule Tatooine, and None of Them Hold Up

After rewatching the whole show I genuinely could not tell you why Boba wants to become a crime lord. The first possible reason is revenge for the Tuskens, but in the short term he and Fennec kill the biker gang and, since Boba does not yet know the Pykes actually did it, that revenge should already feel served. The second possible reason is that he wants to cure Tatooine of its crime after seeing what happened to the Tuskens, which would be a workable motivation, but it is never even remotely expressed on screen.

There is a fine line between subtlety and blatant exposition, and this show lands on neither. Tatooine has never been shown as a place where innocents are constantly being slaughtered. Anakin grew up there as a slave without being constantly whipped or tortured, and the only innocents we actually see killed on Tatooine are the ones killed by the Tuskens themselves. So the idea that Boba wants to protect the innocent does not hold up either.

The third possible reason is that Boba sees the people of Mos Espa as his family, tied to earlier flashbacks that highlight how alone he has always felt. His time with the Tuskens is almost never brought up again and does not affect the plot, except when Cad Bane reveals the Pykes killed them, which changes nothing since Boba was already fighting the Pykes. In the finale Cad Bane asks Boba what his angle is, and Boba answers, "This is my city. These are my people. I won't abandon them," which is close to nonsense but is at least supported by a few lines of dialogue.

The fourth possible reason comes from a scene where Fennec asks Boba why he is doing all this. He first says, "Why not?" and then says he is tired of his kind dying because of the idiocy of others, which reads as resentment toward Jabba after Return of the Jedi. He then adds, "You can only get so far without a tribe," which loops back into the family theory. So his total motivation ends up being a scattered mix of everything, which is embarrassingly weak for a season built entirely around convincing us he wants to rule.

The Show Undoes the Ruthless Boba Fett Established in the Films and The Mandalorian

Boba Fett is a pre-existing character who was allegedly depicted as a ruthless bounty hunter, the kind of villain Darth Vader had to tell to skip the disintegrations, and the kind of character listed as a villain option in Battlefront 2's Heroes versus Villains mode. By the time we reach his own show, he is talking constantly about ruling with respect and doing things the right way, and I do not understand why. People have rightfully pointed out that The Mandalorian season 2 did Boba better than his own series, and I completely agree, since that appearance showed a ruthless, brutal man who still had some honor, not the softer figure this show gives us.

Someone could argue that surviving the Sarlacc pit fundamentally changed him, and that could have been powerful, but it is never even subtly expressed. The only time his near death experience is brought up at all is when he wants to go back for his armor. I do not need him to state outright that he is traumatized, but I need something, and these episodes give me nothing. There is also not a single decent action sequence outside the flashback train attack, and the widely mocked slow speed chase sequence is somehow even worse on a rewatch.

Episodes Five and Six Hijack The Mandalorian's Story Instead of Boba Fett's

Having Mando show up in this show is not the problem on its own, since it is reasonable that Boba or Fennec would want his help against the Pykes. The problem is loading in key pieces of Mando's own story here instead. Mando briefly bounty hunts, misses Grogu, and squabbles around a ring world, which is fine, but then he finds his armor and Paz Vizsla and they start talking about the night of a thousand tears and the origins of the darksaber, setting up the trip to the mines of Mandalore that drives all of season 3. The sixth episode then gives us Luke, Ahsoka and Grogu, and the reunion of Mando and Grogu gets teed up for the finale.

I have a girlfriend who had never seen The Mandalorian, and before The Mandalorian and Grogu movie I wanted to show her the first two seasons, the only two worth watching. She has already seen the trailers, so she knows Mando and Grogu reunite at some point, and I genuinely do not know what to do about that scene existing in a different show that no one deserves to sit through.

The closest comparison I can think of is introducing Tony Stark and Peter Parker's relationship inside Captain America: Civil War, except by that point the Marvel Cinematic Universe had earned the right to lean on its shared universe, and The Mandalorian had not earned that right yet. My guess is that Jon Favreau, Dave Filoni or whoever made this call simply assumed everyone would watch The Book of Boba Fett right after Mandalorian season 2, and that assumption was wrong. Four years later, in a way, The Mandalorian has not recovered from it. I know people who loved the first two seasons watched the start of season 3 and simply stopped. I did not expect The Mandalorian and Grogu movie to make that much money, largely because this show and season 3 killed so much excitement for the story. It makes me lean toward the theory that Disney forced Favreau and Filoni to work Grogu into this season somehow.

Taken purely as more Mandalorian, some of it does work. Mando getting kicked out of his covert for removing his helmet and going to find a ship for Grogu is decent, even if I could do without half an episode of nostalgia for The Phantom Menace and its pod race. Luke's face looks noticeably better here than in Mandalorian season 2, and the show does a good job showing Grogu is not into training and would rather be with Mando. Those scenes probably would have played better inside The Mandalorian itself, and they reinforce that this whole season is really about family, loosely tying Mando and Grogu's loneliness to Boba's own search for one.

The Finale's War for Mos Espa Has No Stakes and No Villain Development

The finale is truly awful, and I would argue it is worse than anything in The Acolyte, setting the Mando and Grogu reunion aside since we already know it ruined the Mandalorian ending. Everything about it is contrived. So much emphasis is put on the people of Mos Espa, yet we barely see them, aside from the cantina crowd blown up at the end of the previous episode. At one point locals even turn on Drash and her friends, which undercuts the idea that these are the people everyone is supposedly protecting.

Boba suggests retreating to Jabba's Palace to defend more easily, and Drash insists they cannot abandon their people and need to show they will fight for them, a line that frustrated me given how little the show has developed those people. I recently covered Andor, where the writers spend real time on Ghorman so that when its people are massacred we feel something and root against the Empire. There is no equivalent work done here, and the Pykes are just as undeveloped as the townspeople.

We are told the Pykes and their spice trade are dangerous, but the only violence we see from them is against people directly interfering with the trade, and we never see anyone enslaved or overdosing because of it. We are simply meant to assume the spice trade is bad because drugs are bad. On top of that, almost no one on Boba's side dies, aside from a couple of unnamed characters and two Gamorreans, while the Pykes are wiped out. With no good guys at real risk, the whole battle plays as noise that nobody in the audience is actually worried about.

Cad Bane's Death and Boba's Rancor Ride Undercut the Fan Service Finale

Cad Bane shows up, reveals the truth about the Tuskens, and it changes nothing, since Boba was already committed to fighting the Pykes and the Tuskens are never mentioned again after this. Their final fight may be the worst in Star Wars. Hardcore fans know Boba and Cad Bane have history, including the dent in Boba's helmet, but that conflict was last addressed in The Clone Wars roughly thirty years earlier in the timeline, and casual viewers have no context for it at all. If this fight was meant to be the climax of the finale, the show never earns it, whether through an earlier appearance for Cad Bane or a flashback to the scene where he actually dents Boba's helmet.

The fight is edited as if it is a triumphant moment when it plays flat, and Cad Bane, clearly brought back for fan service given how popular The Clone Wars is, is written out in an unceremonious way that would leave any fan of the character furious. During the same battle, everyone struggles against shielded spider droids until Boba runs off and comes back riding a rancor, apparently having walked right past Slave I to do it, which only reinforces that the writers just wanted the coolest possible image rather than a coherent choice.

Boba Fett Abandons His Own Cause and the Show Ends Without Any Character Growth

Once the battle ends and Mos Espa is supposedly free, even though nothing has actually changed since episode one, Boba Fett tells the people he is not suited for ruling and wants to hand it off to someone else. After a full season of him insisting this city and these people were his to fight for, that reversal feels like being misled by the writers into believing a passion that was never real. Nobody grows or changes across the season: not Boba, not Fennec, and as season 3 goes on to show, not Mando or Grogu either. The only lasting effect of the whole show is ruining the ending of Mandalorian season 2, and it still finds room for a post credit scene of Cobb Vanth being healed, and he later returned in The Mandalorian season 3, Chapter 21 "The Pirate", in 2023.

Critics and Fans Still Rate It Among the Worst Star Wars Series

The Book of Boba Fett sits at 66 percent on Rotten Tomatoes with a 48 percent audience score, and a 7.1 out of 10 on IMDb. The highest rated episode is chapter 6, From the Desert Comes a Stranger, at 9.2, and the lowest is chapter 3, The Streets of Mos Espa, at 6.4. A friend of mine, a massive Star Wars fan and an even bigger Boba Fett fan, told me, "The Book of Boba Fett nearly killed my love for Star Wars. I spent decades having Boba Fett being my favorite character so much that it was a part of my personality. I ended up giving all my Boba Fett collection to my niece." From what I have seen, that reaction is far more common than not.

Do you hate The Book of Boba Fett as much as I do, or is there more to like in it than I am giving it credit for?